AI, the Golden Calf and the Andean Vampire
The title of this post is as provocative as it is likely impenetrable to a casual eye. Whatever could these three have in common? What are they even?
When I first heard of AI it was through the offices of my good Peruvian friend, who couldn’t appear to say enough in its favour, but then he has for a long time been a technoconvert and worshipper of the world of ‘science’ and technology with it. The idea of its eventually (inevitably as some still think) becoming conscious particularly intrigued him. For me, however, it was the sort of news that one reacts to as with a looming threat over which you have no control, so endeavour to blank it out and get on with life, hoping it will somehow ‘go away’. Unsurprisingly it hasn’t and, as I write, we now have it permeating every aspect of our lives with whole governments and sundry commercial and non commercial organisations queuing up to sign over their lives over to it. Now China has just come up with its own budget Open AI version ‘DeepSeek’, easily as efficient and user friendly, upending nearly the whole of the US stock market in the process, challenging the eye wateringly expensive Open AI of billionaire technocrats in the process.
So, in the way of many a threat that you choose to ignore it has rather inevitably caught up with me, as the arguments for and against are fought along lines of data protection, the impact to creatives and ordinary folk depending upon employment opportunities in a world where businesses and organisations are finding it cheaper and more convenient to get ChatGPT to do all their work instead of a conventional work force. Then there are the equally worrying issues of national security. Recently I gather that the so-called ‘red line’ has just been crossed whereby AI has learned how to replicate and develop itself all by itself.
But when I finally allowed myself to look at it more closely and endeavour to wrap my head around what it was and what it meant, my first feelings were puzzlement and then a sense of shock, that we, as the intelligent beings we are, gifted with such vision and creativity – the immeasurable scope of the human mind – should have given away our crown jewels so readily to a mere machine, and the ability with it to take us over: our lives, our collective knowledge and our creative outputs. Large language models have consumed (as far as I understand) just about every creative work its been possible to ‘feed’ them to ‘learn’ and continue to do so, and creatives are having a bleak and desperate struggle to retain their rights to their own work. Why has this happened? Why have we so undervalued ourselves and given our implicit trust and admiration to something ‘unreal’, to a mere simulator that we fetishise? I was minded of the Biblical story of the Israelites in Egypt, whiling away the time that Moses was away on the mountaintop, by gathering together all their golden artefacts and jewellery and smelting them down to cast into the image of a calf, which they then worshipped. I am not really a biblical expert, so know little enough of the whole story, but the symbolism is yet meaningful and profound. Moses quite understandably was furious with them and dire predications were made on those who had committed such blasphemy against God, to confer the concept of the sacred onto a mere object and then worship it. Which is really what humanity has done with artificial intelligence: to take all of our intellectual and creative wealth and put it into something unholy, with no authentic life of its own. For let us be very clear, the machines can never actually generate original work in the way that we can. All they do is draw upon their immense data bases of knowledge of everything that currently exists to make statistical calculations to produce something drawn from and kindred to it. For those unclear about how it operates, who conflate machine intelligence with human intelligence, please do read the excellent and enlightening explanation by Bernardo Kastrup, himself an early pioneer in AI development ‘The illusion of AI understanding and creativity’. But there is also a sense of inevitability to it, as if it was something that had to happen and that we were unable to avoid. How the golden calf story would have ultimately evolved of course we don’t know, given Moses’ timely intervention and the Children of Israel coming back to their senses.
So how does a vampire fit into this? If there were a genus ‘vampire’, then it’s known by most of us to be something that cannot sustain an independent life of its own, but instead depends upon the life of another, or ‘host’, both to live and, importantly, to reproduce. We know there are bats (the South American vampire bat), and birds (the cuckoo) as natural examples of this. There are also people who behave parasitically in order to live, by exploiting the energy or resources of others. Many traditional cultures have the concept deeply embedded in their mythologies, to warn of forces or dynamics that are hostile to authentic life. There are even interesting examples in the archaeological record of some individuals being buried with deterrent devices to ensure they cannot walk abroad after death and continue to live off the living. But the vampire is also a concept in Indigenous Andean mythology, albeit a relatively late arrival. And whatever the symbol that authentic life force may be in a culture, then the vampire in question will parasatise that to live on. In many Old World cultures it is blood, but in the Andes it is human body fat. All the way to today and our modern world dependent as it is upon increasingly complex technologies, when the vampire is now a mechanical one, unsurprisingly unable to live on its own resources, needing to parasatise the authentic creativity of humanity to perpetuate itself. Welcome to the world of AI.
But why single out the Andean version here as opposed to other Draculeic forms closer to hand? Because, as a late comer, it more clearly shows the original psychological response (myth making) of a people to the impact of what is essentially an invasive species in their hitherto pristine world. Also known as the Kharasiri (Bolivia) and the Naqaq (Peru), the Andean vampire, more commonly referred to as the Pishtaco, is a mythological creature of horror, still feared even today, adept at extracting the life force of Indigenous people in the form of their body fat and using it for personal economic gain.
There are several good accounts of it to be found on the web (3), although in my recently published book ‘Indigenous Concepts of Health and Healing in Andean Populations’ I present a detailed discussion of it and its significance to Indigenous Andeans in the centuries following the conquest of Peru by Spain (4). It is believed to have emerged in the mid 16th century, when the concept of the Spanish stealing the body fat of Indigenous people for personal use in unguents and treatments and export them back to Spain, was first widely rumoured. It has persisted in some central Andean regions until quite recently, to the extent that many global industries and even the NASA space programme was believed to be largely funded by it. The vampiric entity never literally appeared monstrous, but was disguised as some ‘other’: a foreigner, some person of Spanish or Mestizo (mixed) ethnicity, a priest or some church official (given the church itself wasn’t except) having some position of power that the entity could exploit. Outsiders of any kind (more recently even including foreign academics and researchers) might be seen as potentially vampiric. The effect of a vampire attack was to cause the victim to sicken, ultimately to a premature death. Or and more classically they, too, would become kharasiri, and exploit the life force of the culture they had recently been a part of, in turn infecting others. The only way to recover was to buy back – at immense cost- what the vampire had taken. As indicated, there are complex discussions of its meaning and significance, but it is generally associated with the imposition of the alien European capitalistic economic system on the Indigenous Andean that had always functioned according to strict principles of fairness and reciprocal relations, of a cycle of giving and taking, and not according to exploitative for profit motives.
I have touched rather briefly here upon some of the key points of relevance, which to develop any further would make the post overlong and more of a commitment to read. But I think the implications are clear enough. AI may not be simply a question of a ‘mere’ economic exploitation, itself common enough across time, but something far more serious and dangerous even. Yet surely it is something that those who are responsible for developing it and ‘feeding’ it on the entire collective human achievement must have been aware of from the outset. It seems that science and scientists are notoriously led by curiosity and ‘let’s see if we can’ motives, persuading themselves that their only goal is one beneficial to humanity. And then they stare starry eyed in wonder (or perhaps more aptly in horror) at the actual result. It might be argued that technology and innovation is in fact neutral and has also produced life saving interventions, allowing many apparently very beneficial results. But now the whole future of authentic humanity with all of its creative achievements is clearly at stake. And if, as suggested, the so-called ‘red line’ has now been crossed, at what point do we as the authentic life at stake, become redundant? We are told that God made man in ‘His’ own image. So beware what you in turn envision, and then create and worship. It might well come back and eat you!
Just to reassure the reader that this is the product of my own creative writing, and not some AI interface!
Featured Image from: https://www.theindiaforum.in/technology/demystifying-artificial-intelligence-part-i
1. Golden Calf image from: https://www.christianity.com/wiki/bible/misplacing-our-worship-on-golden-calves.html
2. Image of pishtaco from: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/monster-mythology-pishtaco
3. https://przekroj.org/en/art-stories/the-pishtaco-emerges-from-the-andes/
4. Elizabeth Currie and John Schofield. 2024. Indigenous Concepts of Health and Healing in Andean Populations. Understanding the Relevance of Traditional Medicine in a Changing World. Routledge, London. Taylor Francis.
